Formula

As little as Phil Hill needs defending, I feel the need to mention that he was and still is the 1961 Formula One World Driving Champion. In your entertaining and informative piece on Carroll Shelby ("A Donor With a Heart," Jan. 28), you call Hill former world driving champion, which makes it appear that his title was taken away from him or that he lost it to someone else, like a boxing crown. One is always, for example, a Legion of Honor or Victoria Cross winner, and men like Rick Mears and Johnny Rutherford have it good since no one will refer to them as "former Indy winners."

In an attempt to head off a mounting public relations crisis, the Chinese government said locally made milk formula is not what caused early puberty in baby girls as young as 4 months. China's Ministry of Health said Sunday that there was no link between the infant formula made by the Qingdao-based company Synutra International and reports by families using the product that their infant daughters had grown breasts. After testing 73 samples of formula from Synutra and other international and domestic brands, the ministry concluded that the milk powder displayed normal levels of the hormones that might have caused the early development.

Developers hoping to build houses in rugged Topanga Canyon may soon discover that a mathematician is as important to their projects as an architect, a geologist or a slope engineer. Los Angeles County officials have unveiled a complicated formula that they plan to use to determine how large houses can be in a mountainous area. County planners are reacting to canyon dwellers' complaints that oversized homes are being built on tiny hillside cabin lots left over from 1920s-era subdivisions.

Hong Kong action trash meets bottom-of-the-barrel British gangster flick in "Formula 51," an execrable mess that leaves no genre cliche unturned or human body or soul untrammeled. Samuel L. Jackson stars as Elmo McElroy, an American pharmaceutical genius who travels to Liverpool to peddle his latest creation, a drug manufactured from legal ingredients that combines the effects of cocaine, LSD and Ecstasy in one little blue pill.

Pummeled by the worst electronics industry recession ever, SFE Technologies is reshaping itself to try to turn its sagging fortunes around. In a move to placate lenders and investors, the troubled San Fernando-based electronics concern last week disclosed tentative plans to sell plants in New Orleans, Tucson and West Germany--about 20% of the company's manufacturing capacity--to Spectrum Control of Erie, Pa.

One of the hottest debates over Gov. Jerry Brown's $84.6-billion budget involves a $1-billion corporate tax break that businesses promise will spur job growth but that independent analysts say actually gives California companies an incentive to expand out of state. The tax provision took effect only last week. Now, Brown would like to repeal it. The provision is part of a law that allows companies to hire workers and build facilities in California without increasing their income tax liability.

In "The Drifter" (selected theaters), an attractive young woman (Kim Delaney) picks up a handsome hitchhiker (Miles O'Keeffe) against her better judgment and winds up sharing a motel room with him. Once home and back to work, she can't shake the guy. Writer Larry Brand in his directorial debut tries so hard to avoid the predictable lady-in-distress formula that he ends up overreaching disastrously. He deftly establishes that Delaney's well-played Julia is the quintessential yuppie.

U.S. District Judge Murray Schwartz of Wilmington, Del., agreed with a group of 40 small Coca-Cola bottlers that the company should divulge the formulas for Coke and other products. The bottlers are suing Coca-Cola over its pricing policies. Coca-Cola vowed that it would not disclose the 99-year-old recipe. The bottlers said they need the formulas to prove that Diet Coke is the same product as Coca-Cola.

By now, the overwhelming benefit of breastfeeding babies to improve their health, and sometimes to save their lives, is universally acknowledged, even by the companies that produce formula. But breast-feeding rates remain alarmingly low, and the reason is the relentless marketing of these same companies, the implicit collaboration of well-meaning hospitals and the unwillingness of government to abide by its international commitments. Though we would all like to believe that we outsmart advertising and make decisions based on rational assessments, formula companies and the World Health Organization know better.

Many factors are relevant in determining how much the state should spend to provide a child with an "adequate" public education, but this is not one of them: whether the child lives in an area that was largely agricultural during the early 1970s. Yet agricultural zoning is, to this day, a significant component in the stupefyingly complicated formula that determines California's per-pupil funding. Everyone knows the formula is a mess, but for decades the Legislature did nothing to change it. Now, taking advantage of an unusual moment in state budget history, Gov. Jerry Brown has sliced through the paralysis and reached a compromise with legislators to create an immeasurably more sensible, comprehensible and fair formula for funding schools.